The 3rd of June was a Friday. My last entry was from Sunday, the 29th of May. On the Tuesday inbetween, I had a topsy-turvy day.

It started out disappointing. In the morning, I had gone to Iona beach to look for a Lark Sparrow that had been reported there. It was raining and bleak outside, and I got stuck in really bad traffic. After all the time it took to get to the beach, I found pretty much nothing to take photos of. So I had gone out and got cold and wet and sniffly while the birds were probably doing something sensible like staying indoors and sipping hot chocolate.

Later, things perked up. After I made it back home, the mailman rang my bell and delivered a nice new shiny lens. I had liked the wide end of my new 24-120mm so much that I ordered something with an even wider angle: a 12-24mm. (Note to photographers: my camera has a 1.5 crop factor, so this is like a 18-36mm on a normal 35mm camera.) I put the lens on my camera and took a few photos.

Then disaster struck. I was loading these photos into my photo cataloging program when that program crashed, destroying the catalog that it keeps. My catalog is where I record the place where each photo was taken, what is in the photo (generally broken down by species, if possible), how good the photo is, and several other pieces of information. Constructing the catalog entries for all of my photos is the unpleasant part of my photography and photojournal work.

My last backup was two weeks previous. I had lost two weeks' work. And, since I had been on medical leave (and still was), it was two weeks' worth of full-time work. I was severely bummed out at the prospect of having to redo all of it.

But redo it I did, and so I didn't allow much time for getting out into the field over the next week or so. (Thankfully, it was quicker to do the cataloging the second time around.) So that's why it wasn't until Friday that I really tested out my new lens.

I had my camera with me when I decided to pay a visit to the Golden Pita for lunch. The Golden, as I sometimes call it, is my usual Saturday lunchtime haunt, but I've gone through a few periods where it was pretty much an everyday place. Now that I work in Surrey rather than in Burnaby, though, it's too far out of the way for everyday.

Anyhow, with the new wide-angle lens open as wide as it will go, I could stand in front of the counter and get a picture showing most of the setup that they have there.

There's actually another one of these glass-covered metal counters to the right, where they keep the cooked foods. This one is for the cold food—condiments, vegetables, and salads.

That's my friend Rami behind the counter; he's the son of my other friends Roy and Salma, the proprietors. Rami may take over the business, or part of it, one day. Or maybe his sisters will. It'd sure be nice to see it stay in their family; they're all such good people.

Rami was refilling the grape leaves. The grape leaves normally reside in that empty square in the second row from the left. Here he's explaining that refilling the grape leaves is a detailed and important procedure. First, you've really gotta know what you're gonna do.

You have to get psyched. Concentrate on the task at hand. But don't forget to put love into what you're doing.

And you can just see the love he has here, how he's gazing fondly at that grape leaf. I can understand, too; I feel the same way about them. Those things are precious.

The new lens had proven great for these shots; it gets a lot of subject matter in, even where there are tight quarters.

I put down my camera and had the Friday special, beef tenderloin (Shawarma), for lunch. It was fabulous, as usual. Afterwards, I headed home to try the lens out outdoors. Here I got a shot of more-than-the-usual-amount of the lagoon in the courtyard where I live.

The next photo is another vanishing-point shot with the wide-angle set to 12mm. (Actually, this is a slight crop, and the original is a little wider still.)

I'm not normally good at remembering random strings of digits, but the 421905 on that rail carrier just seemed too familiar. I checked when I got home, and sure enough, it was the same rail carrier that I had taken a photo of at Colony Farm Park a week before (see the first photo of my Photojournal entry from the 28th of May). Fifteen kilometers and a week away, the same rail car. It had liked me so much that it came to visit; I was quite flattered.

I'll end here with one more wide-angle test shot, this one in a vertical format. It's the same Atlantic & Western boxcar that started my photos in the yard that day. I love old, rusty industrial stuff.

Atlantic and Western is one of two or three rail companies that I can always count on for some good rust. The Soo Line is another, and sometimes Illinois Central. All their cars may not be rusty, and there are probably lots of other companies with rusty cars, but those are the ones whose rusty cars often end up in my local yard. For that, I thank them.

Always happy to go to the Golden,
Tom